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Greenville Water System, Greenville, SC
The Greenville Water System (GWS) is located in Greenville South Carolina. Nestled in the foot hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the company was started in 1898 to serve a population of 8,600. In 2000 it served over 132,000 customers.
In 1998 the water system realized that the records, some of which dated back to the 1800’s, where getting unmanageable. These records included engineering drawings, plats, water bills, and various other documents. To research a disputed bill a customer service representative would have to follow a paper trail through numerous file cabinets. The water system eventually contracted with Palmetto Microfilm and Imaging Systems to design a system to capture the currently produced data to eliminate as much new paper as possible and to scan and record the years of back files that they where required to preserve. The final solution involved the then OTG Xtendersolutions products. To scan and store the back files, Palmetto provided four Canon 3020 scanners and installed Simplify’s Paperflow as the front end capture software. Since the files had to be prepared to scan a barcode sheet with the account number was printed out and inserted as the lead sheet in the file. Paperflow would read the barcode and no manual data entry was needed. The images and indexes where then imported into ApplicationXtender for retrieval. GWS would use two of the 3020s and ApplicationXtender from day forward to capture any paper documents that where created.
To help eliminate the majority of the paper Palmetto installed COLDXtender to automatically capture electronic reports generated from the AS400 system used by GWS. Using COLDXtender, Palmetto captured and indexed various reports and even all the water bills generated by GWS. Palmetto also created an overlay of the water bill form to simulate the exact water bill when ever a customer service representative would retrieve a bill that was now available on their computer. Palmetto also integrated the ApplicationXtender retrieval software with their IBM Client Access terminal emulation software to allow all queries to be done within their current system. This helped to cut down on training and costs associated with such a large scale project.
To handle the engineering plats GWS used an ANOTECH large format scanner and stored the images into ApplicationXtender for retrieval. This allowed any of the engineers to look at the plats without paving to pull the paper from storage.
GWS also realized that storing all the information it was now collecting electronically was going to be an issue. But palmetto had the answer. Palmetto installed DiskXtender to control three magneto optical jukeboxes and monitor the storage. DiskXtender was configured to write all the data to near line storage. It would then monitor the free space on the drive that was being archived. If the drive began to fill up it would purge the least access files first. This allowed for the most access files to be stored online. The DiskXtender solution also solved the problem of disaster recovery. With all the files written to magneto optical platters that where then mirrored the backups where automated and real-time. If someone retrieved a file that was purged off of the hard drive, DiskXtender automatically would pull the file off the magneto optical disk and present it seamlessly to the user.
In order to continue their investment in the technology, GWS again contracted with Palmetto in 2002 to upgrade their information management solution. This involved upgrading the servers and the Xtendersolutions software. The upgrade gave GWS the opportunity to take advantage of new features and functionality of the new software versions.
The information management system has become and integral part of GWS business processes. Everything from customer service to engineering services has been affected. Customer service response time has been cut dramatically making for happier customers. And productivity in other areas has been increased making everyone at GWS happy. If you would like to talk to a representative of GWS or like to go on a site visit to see what Palmetto can do for you please contact us at 803-359-3703 or E-mail at info@pmsimage.com.
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